Great Weekend Reads

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Three entertaining novels: an epic, wry account of Brits in the Balkans during WWII, a gripping murder mystery in a Southern town, and what Marilyn Monroe's dog, Maf, saw.

The Balkan Trilogy
By Olivia Manning

No young man dreams of growing up to be a lecturer for the British Council. But when I first stumbled across Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy in graduate school, I was ready to be signed up. At nearly a thousand pages, Manning's three novels are a sweeping story of marital love, English manners, and Balkan intrigues, set against Europe's descent into the Second World War. Harriet Pringle, bright and self-confident, joins her husband, Guy, in Bucharest, Romania, where he teaches English at the local university as part of a British cultural program. "Anything can happen now," Harriet thinks as her train chugs eastward, somewhere beyond Venice.

The world is both wide open and rapidly closing down in the fall and winter of 1939-1940, as refugees flood into a Balkan capital already teeming with dinner-suited nobles, penniless peasants, and a motley collection of hangers-on, ne'er-do-wells, Nazi schemers, Romanian fascists, and hounded Jews. At the English Bar in the Athenee Palace Hotel, a parade of exotics makes its way through the gin-tinged haze: Yakimov, the Irish-Russian sponger and alcoholic scion of two drinking cultures; Romanian politicians and their mistresses; and the buttoned-up men of the British legation, pursued by rumpled foreign correspondents. Outside, Romanian children offer themselves as prostitutes, while horse carts carry away the clustered bodies of dead beggars, frozen together in a vain attempt to escape the biting Balkan winds.

All this was part of Manning's own life. English by birth and Anglo-Irish by education, Manning was a painter and writer of minor distinction who, in 1939, married her own version of Guy Pringle. For the remainder of the war, she and her husband managed to keep just ahead of the Nazi armies, fleeing first to Greece and then to Palestine. Like Harriet, she knew both the thrill of adventure travel as well as the niggling dissatisfaction of confining love—the resigned devotion of a talented woman married to a man whose magnanimity and attention were usually directed elsewhere, "a husband made unreliable only by his abysmal kindness," as she wrote of Guy.

Manning was a technically gifted writer, and her descriptions of the inner life of a particular kind of marriage are at times profound. Anyone who has ever joined a lover or spouse after spending time apart—especially after they have already fashioned their own new routines and friendships, or even developed a crush on a doe-eyed colleague—can recognize Manning's masterful account of being an intimate and an outsider at the same time. But her real claim to greatness lies in the evocation of expatriatism: the lure of being "abroad" and the peculiar hold that foreign lands, especially those in the throes of self-destruction, have had on the Western imagination.

Manning was a deft observer of the very English habit of propelling oneself into another country and there compulsively recreating a small bit of the England one originally hoped to leave behind. Bucharest is the unlikely setting, inspired by Manning's being plopped down in an underheated apartment with a husband forever organizing Shakespeare readings and dragging home too many friends. But the persistent worry at the heart of the trilogy is one that bedevils travelers everywhere: What if you start off on an adventure and find that nothing very interesting happens along the way?

The Balkan Trilogy, reissued by New York Review Books, isn't a guide to the Balkans, although anyone who has traveled there will find the local characters and their obsessions intensely familiar. (She followed in the footsteps of Rebecca West and Edith Durham, two other British witnesses to the region's serial problems.) But it is a remarkable field guide to a particular kind of Westerner abroad—underemployed, oversexed, with an appetite for drink, gossip, and nostalgia for home, all in equal measure.

Bucharest is no longer the only place to find people like the Pringles. They have moved elsewhere: Moscow before the rise of shopping malls and oligarchs, Prague before the arrival of German stag parties and the porn industry, and even farther east, in Baku and Tbilisi, even Kabul—all places sitting at the tipping point between sexy-exotic and simply seedy. In the 1920s and 1930s, books and films about obscure east European countries were as popular in Britain and the United States as ones about bits of the Middle East or Central Asia are today. Our grandparents had The Prisoner of Zenda, Ninotchka, and the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup, about the fictional Freedonia; we have The Kite Runner and Three Cups of Tea. But the essential habits of adventure travel and the expatriate life are as real now as in Manning's day: the tension between foreignness and nostalgia, the urge to exoticize, and the persistent fear of returning home without a good story. "You saw it?" one of Manning's characters, the credulous Yakimov, asks a British reporter who has just described a gory assassination in vivid detail. "It was seen," the journalist replies. Quite.

—Charles King is a professor at Georgetown University. His new book, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, will be published in February.